ARTIST LEE WALTON SEEKS FAMILIES FOR PERFORMANCE PIECE AT CHEEKWOOD

ARTIST LEE WALTON SEEKS FAMILIES FOR PERFORMANCE PIECE AT CHEEKWOOD
Work to be featured in Cheekwood’s fall exhibition, More Love: Art, Politics, and Sharing since the 1990s.

NASHVILLE, TN. – In preparation for its thought-provoking exhibition entitled More Love: Art, Politics, and Sharing since the 1990s, Cheekwood announces the first open call for participants in one of several interactive works in the show. The exhibition opens September 20, 2013 and will feature 45 works by contemporary artists that actively engage with love and the many ways it can be expressed in the 21st Century.

As part of More Love, artist Lee Walton is creating This Saturday from Noon to One, A Family Will View the Exhibition, an orchestrated, exhibition-specific piece that blurs the boundaries between real life and performance. Through an open call for participants, Walton will choose fourteen families to simply view the exhibition as naturally as possible each Saturday precisely from noon to 1:00 p.m. throughout the run of the exhibition (September - December 2013). A new "family" will view the exhibition each week of the show; there is no performance or acting required.

Each participating family will be documented with a portrait at the Museum. The portraits will serve as a record of the exhibition and will not be displayed at Cheekwood.

This Saturday from Noon to One, A Family Will View the Exhibition frames everyday, shared experiences as art, celebrating these moments as actions and gestures of love. This project also commemorates a broad range of what a family can be by asking the simple question, “Who is your family?”

While the performance is a formalized, anticipated, and constructed action, it also provides an "actual" art experience for each participating family as they experience the More Love exhibition. In this way, This Saturday from Noon to One, A Family Will View the Exhibition combines life and performance, and engages museum viewers by elevating the quotidian into spectacle. This new piece is an extension of Father and Daughter View the Exhibition, an earlier work created at the Ackland Art Museum during More Love’s original run. Families participating in the performance will not have to pay Cheekwood admission fees.

“These performances are just like real, everyday life. No acting is involved. I just want the families to just be themselves,” says Walton. “Often, my family and I will visit a museum together and it is always an unforgettable (and unpredictable) event. The experience is the art.”

“This piece is wonderful because it’s art about experiencing other art, and more specifically, experiencing it together,” says consulting curator Claire Schneider. “Shared moments of the everyday are at the heart of many of the works in More Love; these moments become things of simple beauty and are an important way we experience love. In addition, there is a long tradition in art where the viewer is invited in to become a collaborator in making the work, so that the work is not complete until they participate. Walton’s work highlights this important development in art and in general contemporary culture.”

For more information about Lee Walton’s This Saturday from Noon to One, A Family Will View the Exhibition, or to participate, please see the work’s web page.

ABOUT LEE WALTON
Lee Walton's work is rooted in conceptual, new media, and social practices, and takes many forms―from drawings on paper to game/system-based structures, and from web-based performances to theatrical orchestrations. Walton has received commissions from museums, institutions, and cities both nationally and internationally, including the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston; Creative Time, Art in General, Socrates Sculpture Park, New York; island6, Shanghai, China; Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland; and The City Museum of Ljubljana, Slovenia; among others.

His work often involves collaboration with numerous participants and practitioners from diverse fields, and he has shown with a number of other artists included in More Love: Sharon Hayes, Dario Robleto, and Julianne Swartz. Walton holds a MFA in visual arts from the California College of the Arts and is currently assistant professor of art at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

ABOUT THE MORE LOVE EXHIBITION
Organized by guest curator Claire Schneider, More Love: Art, Politics, and Sharing since the 1990s is the first major exhibition to investigate the ways in which contemporary artists have addressed love as a political force, as a philosophical model for equitable knowledge exchange, and as social interaction within a rapidly changing landscape of technology and social media.

More Love's foundation rests with the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the pioneering figure who profoundly reworked the viewer's relationship to the art object by dismantling the restrictions imposed on the artist, the viewer, and the object in traditional installations. Among the 29 emerging and established contemporary artists included in the show are Janine Antoni, Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin, Mona Hatoum, Sharon Hayes, Jim Hodges, Tad Hozumi, Emily Jacir, Chris Johanson, Lynne McCabe, Laurel Nakadate, Yoko Ono, Dario Robleto, Gregory Sale, Katerina Šedá, Julianne Swartz, Lee Walton, and Gillian Wearing.

A full-color, 224-page exhibition catalogue, with essays by Claire Schneider, Jonathan Katz, Shannon Jackson, and Dario Robleto, among others, will be available.